President Sally Kornbluth and Governor Maura Healey will kick off the festivities at MIT’s inaugural Future Fest, which aims to bring “together leaders across higher education, government and tech to explore the future of science, technology, art and design across MIT's campus for five days,” writes the Boston Business Journal’s Stephen MacLeod.
Prof. Daniela Rus, Director of MIT CSAIL, and Prof. David Autor, department head of Economics, are featured on Time’s “TIME100 AI 2026” list of 100 innovators, leaders, and thinkers reshaping the world through their advances in AI. “Over three decades, [Rus] has conducted pioneering work in robotics, extending the understanding of what form robots can take,” writes Tharin Pillay, while Steven Freiss describes Autor as “one of the nation’s most vocal and prominent economists aiming to ascertain AI’s potential impacts on labor.”
Prof. David Kaiser writes for Undark about how the new regulations placed on student visas are a detriment to our national competitiveness. "For decades, the U.S. has prospered from a 'brain gain,' attracting talented students from around the world. Graduate students who entered the U.S. on student visas,” writes Kaiser, "have bolstered the American economy.” He adds: "the research phase of a Ph.D. requires students to move beyond known material and to produce something new — to push past what today’s textbooks already include. That sort of innovation rarely happens overnight. The benefits, however, can shape generations.”
MIT researchers found that unless an individual is affected by stroke or dementia, their ability to process language does not decline with age, writes Health Day’s Dennis Thompson. “Scans show that activity in the brain’s language processing network is nearly identical among seniors to that found in younger adults,” writes Thompson. “These results indicate that parts of the brain dedicated to unique functions like language might be less prone to age-related decline than general-purpose networks that contribute to many different skills.”
MIT researchers found that purchased AI tools succeed roughly twice as often as comparable in-house builds, Forbes’ Dennis Vorobyov highlights. “[S]o spend the engineering effort where you are genuinely differentiated,” writes Vorobyov. “Budget wise, none of this requires a moonshot, just clarity and sequencing.”
MassLive’s Juliet Schulman-Hall covers a new report from the MIT Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning and Research Training about AI and education at MIT. “It’s rare that a successful institution has to take a fresh look at many aspects of its mission,” said President Sally Kornbluth in a letter to the community. “But I’m convinced that the opportunities and risks generative AI poses for our model of education and research now constitute such a watershed for MIT — and for all of higher education.”
Writing for Forbes, Joseph Coughlin, Director of the MIT AgeLab, describes the importance of considering home security beyond simple intrusion protection in longevity planning. “A longevity-ready home to age-in-place isn't simply a safer, more accessible home,” writes Coughlin. “It is a home surrounded by an architecture of people, technology, and services that can detect, communicate, and respond even when we, or the people who care about us, cannot.”
In a message to campus, President Sally Kornbluth shared a new report by MIT’s Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use that found that “even as AI accelerates and expands discoveries, it is also driving dramatic changes in campus culture, upending foundational experiences such as study groups, office hours and undergraduate research,” writes the Washington Post’s Susan Svrluga. “For the sake of our students, for the future of MIT and for the shape of our sector and our society,” says Kornbluth, “it’s imperative that we get this right.”
A new study by MIT researchers found that it is impossible to draw a direct link between AI diffusion model outputs and an artist’s body of work, writes Gizmodo’s Webb Wright. “If a [diffusion] model generates something, you want to be able to say, ‘Oh, this part of the training data was responsible,'” says Zheng Dai, PhD ’24, lead author on the study. “It’s important for us to understand how these models work to properly study them or regulate them.”
The Financial Times’ Anjana Ahuja spotlights research led by Prof. Dennis Whyte on the economics of fusion energy. “Economic Q, the metric devised by Whyte and others and which must exceed one to represent net economic gain, compares the capital gained over a fusion energy plant’s lifetime to that expended,” writes Ahuja. “Factors reflect the extreme engineering involved and include construction costs, component durability and the efficiency of converting fusion power into a commodity.”
Research Associate Awad Abdelhalim found that 46 per cent of the miles traveled by Waymo between August 2023 and December 2025 in California were ‘deadhead’ miles, where the vehicle traveled without a passenger, reports the Financial Times’ Kana Inagaki, Megan Snaith and Jim Pickard. Abdelhalim says, “the findings showed that — like human-driven taxis — Waymos were on the road more than the average private car,” Inagaki, Snaith, and Pickard write. “[A]s robotaxi fleets scale up, this could become an issue that needs to be addressed [in the UK], said Abdelhalim.”
Prof. Emeritus Rodney Brooks speaks to Scientific American’s Mary Randolph about humanoid robots interacting with the real world. “When you see a performance of an [artificial intelligence] system or a robot on one thing,” says Brooks, “that fools us into thinking that it has the same general competence as a human. And that’s a mistake people make.”
MIT’s Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training has released a report on AI and education and recommendations for the Institute moving forward, writes Forbes’ Ron Schmelzer. “President Sally Kornbluth describes the moment as a ‘watershed’ for MIT and higher education,” writes Schmelzer. “The recommendations include redesigned assessments, renewed attention to hands-on learning, explicit AI rules for courses and new communities of practice for faculty.”
Writing for Forbes, Arvid Ernst Gollwitzer, a research scholar at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, spotlights FINGERS-7B, an AI foundation model for Alzheimer’s prevention his research team developed at MIT. “By analyzing signals spanning everything from genetic risk factors to long-term environmental exposures, the model detects patterns that no single-domain approach could find,” writes Gollwitzer. “These patterns, which we call multi-omic precision signatures, represent a new kind of biomarker for gauging early disease risk.”
WBUR’s Maddie Browning highlights exhibits by artists Uri Aran and Hao Jingban set to be displayed at the MIT List Visual Arts Center from Oct. 23 to Feb. 28. Aran’s first major institutional solo exhibition in the U.S “includes new works that feel strange yet recognizable," while Jingban’s “‘I Witness’ (2025) explores the aftermath of the pandemic through four people experiencing different forms of loss,” writes Browning